


Nightmares

by rebecca_selene



Category: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:00:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22166767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebecca_selene/pseuds/rebecca_selene
Summary: Briar Rose’s spirit belongs in the forest. When she starts manifesting strange powers, she uses them to her full advantage to remain there.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17
Collections: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 9, Ladies Bingo 2018





	Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afterandalasia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/gifts).



> written for:  
>  -my [hc_bingo](https://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) [Round 9 card](https://rebecca-selene.dreamwidth.org/111325.html) prompt: phobias  
>  -my [ladiesbingo](https://ladiesbingo.dreamwidth.org/) [Round 6 card](https://rebecca-selene.dreamwidth.org/111588.html) prompt: warning signs  
>  -a [disney_kink](https://disney-kink.livejournal.com/) [prompt](https://disney-kink.livejournal.com/4400.html?thread=3850032) from [afterandalasia](https://afterandalasia.livejournal.com/)

While Briar Rose slept, she dreamed. 

She dreamed of a handsome man approaching her in the forest, dancing with her to the music of birdsong. She imagined, in a way she recognized as silly and romantic, that he was a prince, come to whisk her away to a palace of endless balls and glamour, heavy feast tables and the constant buzz of human chatter.

She woke with a start, sweat upon her brow. In the dim morning sunlight filtering through her curtains, she eyed her familiar tiny room, reassuring herself she was still in her own simple bed in her own simple clothes.

 _What a horrible nightmare_ , she thought as she opened the window to return the singsong morning greeting of her avian friends.

***

When Briar Rose met the man from her dreams in the forest that day, she could only stare mutely as her dream played out in real life, her friends betraying her desire to flee by pushing her to the man and providing the music of their dance.

A thrill ran through her when he said he'd dreamed of this meeting. She was too wrapped up puzzling out how a dream could be shared that she barely noticed herself agreeing to see him again, and then he was gone on his beautiful steed, the forest swallowing him. She sent out a hope that he would get lost and never be able to trace his way back to her.

Returning home, she told her aunties what had happened, and despite her wary demeanor and words to the contrary, they assumed she had fallen for this man. They wrung their hands and cast their eyes down, confusing Briar Rose until they spilled her dark secret. She was a princess, already betrothed, kept hidden in her beloved forest to protect her from an evil curse, and she could not dream of marrying a strange man from the forest. Briar Rose cared none for that, but her eyes widened when they told her she must return to the palace and her parents on the morrow for her sixteenth birthday, to leave the only home she'd known and abandon the life she'd been lied about by the people she most trusted.

She wept, then, running to her tiny room and lying inconsolable on her thin cot, imprinted with the shape of her body. The fairies—not even her aunts—assumed she was lovestruck and heartbroken. They were right about one, but she didn't bother correcting them about the other.

She had no one to turn to but herself and could see no way to remedy the shattering of her cozy life.

***

That night when she finally fell into a fitful sleep, unwilling for hours to spend the last remaining time at home in unconsciousness, she dreamed of green fire consuming her and almost welcomed its embrace. But there was a darkness to it, a tinge of evil that even in her desperate state she didn't want to approach. And so she pushed back, sent the fire rushing toward a crumbling, barren terrain on the horizon with the silhouette of a crooked tower reaching into the sky like reverse lightning.

In her dream another castle appeared, this one bright and alive, and though she had never seen it before she recognized it as her future prison. Had any fire remained, she would have sent it in that direction too.

As it was, the vague satisfaction she woke up with at having defeated her dream antagonist faded when the three false aunts bustled around to get her ready, fitting her into fancy cloths with bright patterns that lay uncomfortably on her skin, protesting that she would want for nothing at the palace when Briar Rose tried to take her few meager, dear possessions. Barely able to breathe or walk in the stiff dress, tears in her eyes and mutiny in her heart, Briar Rose followed the fairies to what was surely her doom.

***

It was the loudness that bothered her most. The voices of hundreds of people echoed through the vast ballroom chamber, bouncing back down off the ceiling and returning to the cloud of ringing so that Briar Rose could not concentrate on any one thing. In the forest there was no deafening roar like this, and no enclosed space among the treetops to trap it long after its life was spent. The air was warm and stale with sweat and bad breath. Had it not been for the fairies at her back, Briar Rose would have turned and fled down the castle's stairs.

***

A great weariness seeping into her body and mind, she wept on the vanity in the room the queen and king who had given her up to the forest said belonged to her.

A green mist entered the room, beckoning her with a crooked smile. She followed it, reached her hand toward it, hoping it would lead her home, or at least away from this awful destiny.

The mist swirled and took shape into a tall, cloaked figure. Briar Rose paused to examine it. "I know you," she said slowly. "The fairies warned me about you." She moved her arm to touch Maleficent, and just before her skin reached the black form, she felt a pricking in her fingertip. 

Maleficent cackled and dissolved as Briar Rose tumbled to the ground.

***

"Not even your prince can save you now!"

It was precisely in her sleeping state when Briar Rose felt most powerful. "Why in the world would I need a prince to save me?" She poked around the landscape of her mind, which had become clearer to her as she approached her 16th birthday. She flexed her thoughts, wishing harm to the evil being who deprived her of life, and to her surprise heard a sharp cry in response. She flexed again, and again came the cry, the sound tinged with green and purple the way only dreams could mix those senses.

She wanted to reach out again, to torment her tormentors, to see if she could reach others as well, but she stopped. Pain wasn't enough, wasn't right. They had deprived her of so much, had made her fearful of all in the world. 

Two could play at that game.

She recalled what her three false aunts had said. "Maleficent is cruel, and petty, and cursed you for an insignificant slight." For not being invited to her own birth party.

Briar Rose flooded Maleficent's mind with feelings of isolation and neglect, brought her back to that realization that an entire kingdom was on an invitation list she was not, kept her there and overwhelmed her senses until Maleficent's screams of rage turned to ones of hopeless terror at being abandoned.

Smirking in her sleep, Briar Rose released the force of her power and turned to the three fairies. She hesitated, sensing their goodness, remembering their kindness in raising her. But then she remembered why they had raised her, where they had delivered her, and grew cross again. It wasn't difficult to feed them images of her own slumbering form, the evidence of their failure. 

Next she visited Phillip, the man from her nightmare, who kept insisting he have her, that he deserved her as if she were a prize and not a person. To him she fed such harrowing images of defeat by dragons, a fall from grace and pride, that she thought the would-be hero might have descended into madness as a result.

A fury of green distracted her. Maleficent rose before her, lightning arcing from her staff. "How dare you!!" she thundered. She aimed the white-hot bolts at Briar Rose, but they went right through her dream form without her feeling anything but satisfaction.

"Why didn't you just kill me then? Why such an elaborate curse?"

"It was never about you. It was about punishing those around you who insulted me."

"You made it about me. Now you have to contend with me. Release me, fairy."

Maleficent laughed. "Just when I've finally had my revenge? I think not."

Briar Rose assaulted Maleficent's mind again. "You can't hide from me. You've had your revenge. Tell me, is your sanity worth continuing it?"

Maleficent roared futilely. Briar Rose let her power wane, then rise again, an incessant wave of fear-laced memories and images until finally, bent at the waist and clutching her staff for support, Maleficent said, "Very well. You win. I release you." And Briar Rose woke up.

***

No one stopped her from leaving the palace. She entered the treeline and made her way home, her steps lightening as she went until she was nearly flying. She flung open the cottage door, startling a pair of squirrels who were rummaging in the cupboard, and laughed from deep in her belly. "I'm home," she said to the bewildered animals, who nevertheless ran to greet her. "I'm home."

***

She sensed the three fairies try to come after her and sent them warning images of a frightful forest ready to gobble them up. Phillip, not broken after all but more determined than ever to obtain her, took half a dozen increasingly disturbed bouts of warnings before he limped off shaking and didn't try again. Maleficent, it appeared, was smarter than them all and made no further attempts to find Briar Rose, though she was ready, her power no longer limited to her sleeping moments, fully in her control at all times.

While Briar Rose walked now, she dreamed. 

Maleficent could have her broken castle, her parents and false aunts their stiff kingdom, Phillip his empty bed. She would have her forest and her friends, and the ability to protect them.

It was all she had ever wanted.


End file.
